Guild Wars 2

Swadow.6213:

For a Necro Staff is a necessity. A build without a Staff is really bad, there is no reason to go without one.

This is wrong. I run a dagger/warhorn axe/focus well build and it works extremely well in both PVE and PVP. I only use staves during tower/keep sieges in WvW, but this is no different than a warrior needing to swap out his off weapon for a longbow/rifle during tower/keep sieges. In PVE there hasn’t been a single instance of me needing to use a staff.

Its not just the Asura it seems.

Nexon already did get it. The new shift in direction is evidence of that.

This is why I think the gem store is being mismanaged. They did this in GW1. Why aren’t they doing it in GW2? Instead we’re getting these god awful RNG chests. Huge waste of resource IMO.

AveryFarman.2973:

ArenaNet basically just pulled a “bait and switch”, and I’m still trying to figure out why.

I don’t think it was ANet directly. NCSoft is the problem. They have a looooong history of pulling bait and switch marketing. Aion was the most recent example before GW2.

No. My necromancer is not amused. Pic related.

I have over 938 hours played in this game so far. I only know of 2 other people who have me beat. I’d say I’m a dedicated player. I’ve even spent money in the gem store. I consider myself a dedicated player. I haven’t played any other game since GW2 launched.

With that said, I think ascended gear is a huge mistake that will drive me away from the game if it continues. I have no desire to gear treadmill. Been there, done that, never want to repeat it again.

Doubt it. But nice theory.

I’m doing this as well. I’ve been running fractals with my guild, but I’m not going to go out of my way to obtain these ridiculous grind fest items. If I get one, whatever. Probably not going to use it anyway since I am going for a very specific set of stats.

My focus is WvW. Not PVE grind fests.

The Gem store in this game is really being mismanaged. In GW1 the biggest sale items were costumes and character re-customization. Character re-customization doesn’t exist and the costumes were kitten. The town clothes costumes don’t really do anything so no one bothers with them outside of holiday events. After the Halloween event debacle, no one who isn’t brain damaged is going to bother with the RNG chests.

Pro tip for the “Monetization Manager”: What worked in Maple Story isn’t going to work in GW2. Maple Story was free to play. GW2 is Buy to Play and houses a much older demographic age wise. Most of us won’t be tricked by these obvious cash grabs. Do better research. Look at what GW1 did. I have to tell you, I’ve been dying to re-customize my characters. That means I’d pay money to do it. Why isn’t this available as an option yet? Where are the armor skins that don’t look like they’ve been made by an intern?

Can you tell us what gear/jewels you’re using for WvW? Knights, berserkers, valks? If you want to keep it secret, thats fine too. You can always PM me with the infos. I won’t leak it.

Spracket.9604:

I was about to make a new thread about this so I’ll just paste what I was going to say.

Why are passion flowers so hard to gather? The rarity of these makes crafting apothecary’s gear much more difficult than any other set. To make all 5 exotic pieces, you need a total of 375 passion flowers, and I haven’t gathered a single one from passiflora. The only passion flowers I have are from consortium chests, and they only seem to pop up one at a time.

Karka shells have a low drop rate as well, but at least they’re dropping at all. To make a full set of Apothecary’s armor, you need 180 shells, just less than half of the number of flowers you need to make the jewelry (and that’s 6 pieces, as opposed to 5).

It also makes no sense when comparing it to the drop rate of other gem options. Apothecary’s is just an alternative to cleric’s, and yet cleric’s is fathoms cheaper. Making one exquisite sapphire gem requires 5 sapphire orbs, an item that (1) is very easy to acquire by one’s self, and because of this (2) is very cheap in the trading post. Currently, one sapphire orb is going for about 2 silver, while a single passion flower is going for 8.
In other words:
-the required gems for a piece of cleric’s jewelry ~ 10 silver
-the required flowers for a piece of apothecary’s jewelry ~ 1 gold, 20 silver

What is justifying the ridiculous difference in value for this particular stat combo? I can only assume that this is some sort of fumble because I don’t see the justification for making the drop rate of a green-level item lower than that of a yellow.

Google search Chystin Cox. She’ll be the one behind this shenanigans. This kind of scenario is exactly what was happening in Maple Story.

Servanin.5021:

Sword warriors can spike up to 25 stacks of bleed. Can’t hold it up there forever, but at least every 10 seconds they can use flurry.

I don’t know if i’d call the damage slow. The bleeds from flurry only last around 3 seconds with traits, don’t attacks like hundred blades and pistol whip take that long to finish anyways?

Thieves are decent bleeders too. Spec for all the initiative returns you can, spam death blossom.

And Caltrops. Caltrops alone can reach 10+ stacks on a group of enemies with the proper runes and sigils. Then, like you said, add Death Blossom and you can easily reach 25 stacks of bleed on a group of enemies.

Thieves, actually. Maybe rangers after that. It sure as hell isn’t necromancers. Yes, necros can spread conditions, but they can’t stack conditions for crap.

Its already been happening. I posted this in another thread already but last night I got turned down for a FotM group because “Necromancers can’t DPS”. FotM is already hard enough getting a group for because of the stupid level mechanic. This just makes things even worse. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing this class any more.

No. I wouldn’t waste your time. I got turned down for a FotM group last night because “Necros can’t do damage”. That dungeon is already hard enough to get groups for without people feeling like necromancers are handicapped. Its actually not the first time I’ve been turned down for groups based on that fact.

pmargeti.7680:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Earth

Notes

This effect has a 2 second cooldown

Hmm, well crap. Any suggestions on what I should replace it with then? Sigil of Corruption wouldn’t make to much sense since you don’t really kill people with the staff. Its more of a control weapon.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Kravick.4906:

Before I never understood the NCSoft hate.

Look up someone who played CoX games. I’ve had a couple people tell me pointblank GW2 could be the best game ever and they wouldn’t touch it because they were mourning the loss of a game they were really having fun with.

Yeah I heard about what happened with City of Heroes. The game was actually improving, AND turning a profit as well as slowly gaining subscribers after Cryptic drained it for all its worth. Then NCSoft turns around and shuts it down without any kind of advanced warning. People try to log in one day and poof, servers gone. I originally thought it might have been some internal thing we as gamers are not privy to, but now I’m not so sure.

Alberel Leonhart.9640:

To be honest it would be for the benefit of the entire MMO genre for this to scare Nexon so bad they don’t invest in any MMOs again. It’d even let me feel that GW2’s death wasn’t in vain if Nexon got burned bad enough by it.

The industry as a whole would have a LOT more variety if the corporate suits weren’t interfering with everything to maximise profits via the ‘WoW clone’ path.

This I agree with. As much as it would suck for GW2 to be shut down, I have to admit that it would be a small sacrifice if it meant companies like EA, SOE, NCSoft, and especially Nexon would drop out of the MMO market for good.

I already had a few friends who refused to play GW2 because the NCSoft logo was attached to the box. I already have a few more who are quitting over this ascended gear business. Others are adopting a wait and see approach, but have all said that if ANet doesn’t make some drastic changes and go back on this shenanigans in the next couple of weeks, they too are going to abandon ship.

Before I never understood the NCSoft hate. Now I’m starting to see why people don’t like them. The only game I’ve played with that logo on it was GW1, which was a great game. Apparently NCSoft has a very big reputation for bait and switch tactics though. Right now I’m getting a lot of “I told you so” from those friends of mine who didn’t buy GW2 because of the NCSoft logo.

Araushnee.1852:

Going on sites that sell GW2 and leaving bad reviews isn’t going to make the situation better. I do not want GW2 to take this new path, but Tobias has a point. Just look at what is happening to Hostess… The protests have put Hostess out of business and we will have no more twinkies. =(

Wait, what happened to Hostess?!

Decided to try out the Superior Sigil of Geomancy on my staff. I’ve found that it only works about half the time, though. The sigils on my other weapon set are Agony and Earth. I know Geomancy says it has a cool down of 9 seconds, but weapon swapping is 10 seconds so there shouldn’t be any overlap. Neither Agony or Earth show that it has a cool down.

I am aware of what happens with two different proc sigils. If one procs, the other must wait for the original proc cool down to expire before the second has a chance to proc. In other words, it pointless having 2 proc effect sigils. However, Earth doesn’t say it has a cool down.

Does anyone know if Sigil of Earth has a hidden cool down that might be interfering with the cool down on Geomancy? Or is Geomancy just bugged?

I didn’t like the Lost Shores limited event. It bugged out on my server and I wasn’t able to get past phase 1. I was also unable to do the final event because of RL obligations (work). Limited time events are fine if they stick around for a week or so. They’re also pretty cool when they actually work. Limiting them to a specific time on a specific day is also very, very stupid. Yes, I said stupid, because it is what it is. Stupid.

At least this more or less cements in the fact that Death Shroud is taking double damage from Conditions, right?

Its ok. Necromancers are OP because of Death Shroud.

GamerToukotsu.4219:

LotRO wasn’t the only company to introduce something like this, several years back EverQuest II introduced something called Critical Mitigation. It was only on raid gear at the time, then began being placed throughout the game in Solo, Group and Raid dungreons. It took 4 years to completely remove it from the game.

A single factor that takes any form of skill outside of the players hands such as a limiting factor shouldn’t be added into any game. Remember your players are your customers and while some players might enjoy a debilitating condition placed on themselves not all your players will, ultimately you might lose some customers over this issue if its not handled the right way.

I remember that. It got so bad that you needed upwards of 200% critical mitigation just to do entry level dungeons. A new character or player had no hope of ever achieving that much mitigation without some serious back tracking by your guildmates. PUGs and casuals had no hope if they didn’t play during the first month of an expansion when everyone was gearing up in those dungeons..

ANet already did this in a previous game. It was called Spectral Agony. People absolutely hated it. It required people to do a rather difficult dungeon in order to infuse one piece of gear (had to do this 5 times over all) to protect you from an insta-gib attack that all Mursaat enemies did. Eventually ANet compromised and made it so it would infuse all your armor instead of just once piece. Then they never used that mechanic again until now.

ANet doesn’t even learn from their own mistakes it seems. Or perhaps its Nexon/NCSofts meddling. Either way, whoever is in charge of these decisions hasn’t done any kind of research. Sadly, the damage has already been done I’m afraid. I fear this may have been the straw so to speak. Combined with the ridiculous amount of bugs still in the game, the class imbalances/bugs, along with their focus on these broken one time events (I couldn’t do it because it was permanently broken on my server), and this new development direction that goes in a 180 degree direction from their previous design goals, we’re going to see people leave soon. The gem store is also a massive failure in many peoples eyes that just compounds the issue. We’ll start seeing the results of that damage here in the next month.

AcidicVision.5498:

11 hours ago Quidy felt strongly enough to let us know he was uninstalling the game and going to play somewhere else.

Well into the evening now he can be found in Queensdale running around care-free doing heart quests.

This is why fare-well threads get deleted and why no one takes the threats seriously.

Glad you are still enjoying the game.

PS2 comes out tomorrow. Pretty sure he won’t be playing GW2 after that.

This thread has all the information you’ll need. Works in WvW too.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Need-help-for-a-DPS-build-for-Necro

Rhyse.8176:

• Step 1: Be a company who’s stock is falling rapidly.
• Step 2: Look for ways to bring in more profit. Your flagship product is GW2. Hmmm…
• Step 3: In GW2’s case, getting more profit means getting more players.
• Step 4: See why existing players are leaving. Visit forums. See complaints about “endgame.” Don’t take the basic time to read them or the responses very well.
• Step 5: Order that an “endgame” be added immediately.
• Step 6: Wince in pain as your lack of market knowledge, research, effort or business sense of any kind, and lack of respect for your internal leaders who no doubt warned you about what will happen, causes a rush of refunds and massive loss of customers.
• Step 7: (yet to happen) Downsize to cut costs; try desperately to reverse Step 5 and 6, possibly eating a major short term loss in the process.
• Step 7a (bad ending): Find a scapegoat, other then yourself, who just happens to be the person(s) most able to regain customer support for your product. Fire them. In turn, get fired yourself because the remains of your product team can’t keep it afloat. Product dies.
• Step 7b (good ending): After major internal reorganizing, downsizing and re-budgeting, and finally listening to your product developers, step back, leave the product in their qualified hands, and allow the long slow recovery to take place. Lower your ambitions to something actually achievable, doing market research this time to figure out what that is. Turn a small but consistent profit off the product over the next decade.

Doom and Glooming aside, this is a very likely scenario that is occurring right now. NCSoft had a horrible financial year last year. They even shut down City of Heroes because of it. What I don’t understand is why when that game was still turning a profit according to the development studio in charge of it.

Very recently Nexon bought up roughly 15% of NCSoft’s stock. That makes them a major share holder now with a lot of weight when it comes to making decisions. Nexon publishes a ton of pay to win game models (why is it even legal for competitors to buy stock from each other?). It is likely that Nexon is causing NCSoft to get more involved and meddlesome with their published titles, which includes Guild Wars 2.

I really hate publishers. They care nothing for the quality of the product itself. They just see dollar signs and will kitten anything up in an attempt to generate more. Very, very rarely does changing a design philosophy/goals in the middle of a games life ever lead to positive profits in the long run. Examples of this are Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, and Starwars Galaxies.

If anyone would like to provide examples of games that have benefited and been turned around by such major shifts, I’d love to hear about them. Right now I can’t think of any game that has ever done better by radically altering their original design goals.

I used to have faith in Anet. After discovering they have only 2 people working on bug fixes and class balance my faith is gone. Now I understand why it literally took Anet years in GW1 to fix glaring class balance issues.

Post build or I call BS.

Ah yes. Signet of Malice. Its one of their heal abilities. Comes standard like that without even having to trait for it. Thieves get all kinds of other ways to regenerate and leech health as well on top of it. Thieves can heal ridiculous amounts of health with 4+ targets around them like this.

I’ll say it again because it needs repeating. Anything a necromancer can do, another class can do better.

Lifelike.5862:

You can’t compare D/S to litch form. Deathshroud pops up on a regular timer, while litch form has a really long cooldown. You can’t reliably use litch form to migitate damage the way you can in D/S.

Why are you spelling lich with a T? Stop that.

Kravick and other people on these forums are acting like they’re broken and utterly useless at anything, but they certainly bring things to the table, top DPS isn’t one of them, no matter the spec.

If even you can admit to this fault then its not even an argument that necromancers are broken. Anets manifesto specifically stated that all classes are able to do all things. DPS, support, and control. It just varies on how they want to spec at that given time. Currently, necros cannot DPS. Period. Necromancers “special” class mechanic, fear, is the worst in the game. Warriors and thieves actually fear better and longer. Anything a necromancer can do, another class can do better, so why bother being a necromancer? What so special about this class that warrants its existence?

Further proof of this is the fact that people will gravitate towards classes that function well in PVP. Necromancers are the least played class right now. I shouldn’t need to explain why.

As someone who has a level 80 warrior, thief, and at one point a level 80 necromancer (deleted it), yes, this class is very bad. There is a reason you only see warriors, thieves, mesmers, and guardians in PVP.

I’m not saying its so bad you can’t level to 80 and kill stuff, but by comparison, the damage the necromancer puts out when traited and geared for pure DPS is approximately less than half of any other class thats geared and traited for DPS. Any time I am in a dungeon with a necromancer it takes forever to complete. They don’t really have the killing power of the other classes.

The necromancer trait tree itself is in absolute shambles and make no sense as well. No one can figure out if the traits are supposed to be the way they are or if the traits are actually bugged or not. Anet has been extremely silent on these issues as well so we’re constantly being left in the dark as to how our traits are supposed to function. To compound that problem, necromancers boast the largest bug list of any other class currently.

Minions are completely useless, and there is a thread here on the front page of a dev claiming minions function contrary to what is actually happening in game. While I seriously don’t want to sound like I’m bashing on anyone in particular, its painfully obvious after that response that no one on the dev team is actually playing this class. All I can say is that Anet seem to be out of touch with whats happening in their game in regards to this class.

Jon Peters has come to this forum saying he was afraid of how OP necromancers can get because of the death shroud mechanic if necromancers got buffed. The death shroud mechanic would be fine if the abilities in death shroud actually mattered or even had the ability to change fights. On paper, death shroud probably sounds strong. In function, death shroud sucks. I honestly wish they would scrap that mechanic so they can bring necromancers up to par with the other classes balance wise. As it stands, death shroud is merely a gimmick and an “Oh kitten!” button, and its not even very good at that. All it takes is 5 minutes of play time to realize that death shroud doesn’t save you from anything. It merely prolongs the inevitable. On both my thief and warrior I have destroyed death shroud in 2-3 hits on a level 80 player (not up leveled). I can honestly say without embellishment that I have NEVER been downed, let alone killed, by a necromancer in WvW or sPvP. I’m an average player at best. Necromancers are a joke and a free kill every time I come across them. In sPvP, any time I have seen a team with 2 or more necromancers, that team usually ends up losing unless they have a godlike player to carry them. I cannot say the same about any other class ATM.

Anet has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to fixing balance issues on this scale. All you have to do is look at Dervish, Paragon and Elementalist (after hard mode was introduced, before they were fine) from GW1 to realize it takes them YEARS to fix these balance problems.

TLDR: I would seriously not waste your time with this class.

Why does no one at Anet play a necromancer?

Derk.3189:

Lol after all that response from Jon Peters about reanimator, did we see a change? Nope.

When Anet says they’re going to do something, expect the opposite. Remember in beta when they said necros need love? They turned around and nerfed axe into the ground. Remember when Anet said they were going to nerf thief backstab? Dancing Dagger got nerfed instead while leaving backstab untouched. Then everything about rangers.

The developers are obviously not communicating with their teams. They say one thing, and something else completely different happens.

Traits still unaddressed, axe still hits like a wet paper bag, dagger still not brought up to par with other classes close range power based weapons, life transfer abilities still worthless, and the tons of other trait related bugs still go unfixed. I understand this process takes time, but its been 3 months.

If that wasn’t enough now they’re adding power creep of all things. I do not understand Anets priorities. They say one thing and then do the complete opposite.

I’ll post build if requested.

Post build please. I’m curious as to what armor/jewelry stats you’re running as well.

No, its not getting old. I’d much rather have this system where ANet can patch on the fly without having to bring the servers down for 1-3 hours just for a small update. The fact that we can log in immediately after patching is amazing. The resetting of resource nodes are but a very, very small inconvenience I’d happily deal with instead.

The only thing I hear in LA is the regular music you always hear.

Here you go.

This is with a Charr female though. I don’t know if the males do it differently.

So ive done a Halloween door now that they are fixed and it appeares that they don’t count for Halloween events completed even though the doors are events so either its bugged or something else is the events.

I’m having this same issue as well. I don’t know if its a bug, or that these aren’t the events we’re looking for. So far I’ve killed the giant king candy elemental, the mummy, and various “kill everything that comes out of the door” events and none of them have updated my achievement list.

I would love to dual wield shields. Even if its totally impractical from a realism standpoint, just once I would like to run around slapping stuff with shields.

Number 3 ability needs to be a Captain America boomerang shield skill that bounces between multiple targets.

Rampage is terrible. It needs to be reworked. Just pretend its not even there.

Charrzooka is fun, but its really just a toy. I like busting it out when I’m messing around in low level zones or doing world completion. Its not something you run with normally or build your traits around.

So to answer your question, Charrzooka. You will at least put it to some use, unlike Rampage.

I use orbs for the most part. The exception is Runes of the Dolyak for the regeneration effect when I am running a regeneration build on my warrior and Runes of the Soldier for PVP. Can’t have enough condition removers in PVP.

My charr needed running gloves so I already have them.

It would be nice if they would actually post this information on the official forums in an easy to see place. I hate having to go to 3rd party websites to get official news. I refuse to even create a Facebook account so anything they post there I’ll never see.

Pixel.3182:

I guess I’ll try find a group to do it with, hopefully lots of people like going to Arah story mode.

They don’t. Arah story mode is still a boring bug ridden mess.

Let me guess. Blue is Blackgate?

Corebot.2701:

just a friendly FYI, if you see a skin, head to the pvp locker and preview them until you find the one you were looking for.

Also, yep that’s a krait weapon

Problem with that is that the name of the weapon in the locker doesn’t necessarily have the same name on the trading post.